Last night I met with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants to watch Max Ophüls' Caught (1949), the first of his two American films noirs. It's not as complex or as coherent a picture as its follow-up The Reckless Moment (1949), which stunned me in May, but it's a striking, strange, surprisingly blunt examination of the ways in which a woman can be trapped and bound by social conventions, constructions of gender, her own body and the laws which govern it. Much of it is still all too relevant and recognizable today, and I don't say that just because the film opens with two roommates morosely totaling their limited finances and complaining about the humidity.
At first the story looks like a simple cautionary tale: the terrifying ease with which a Cinderella romance can turn into a Bluebeard marriage. Despite his brusque manner and his contemptuous affections, ex-carhop and recent charm school graduate Leonora Eames (Barbara Bel Geddes) allows herself to accept a proposal of marriage from high-powered businessman Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), because he's worth ninety million and how do you say no to that? No sooner are the wedding headlines yesterday's news than the reality of Leonora's situation sets in: her husband is a chilly, controlling, volatile man who gets his philosophy straight from Ayn Rand; he views every interaction as a transaction and despises his wife for marrying him, because her acquiescence only proves that he met her asking price. He only married her to spite his psychiatrist.1 Very sensibly, she flees Ohlrig's cavernous rococo mansion and takes a job as a receptionist in an East Side clinic where she forms a friendship with unfazeable obstetrician Dr. Hoffman (Frank Ferguson) and something closer with his partner Dr. Larry Quinada (James Mason), an idealistic dropout from the upper middle class still figuring out what a bedside manner looks like. "I'm a very good textbook doctor," he admits after his underestimation of an anxious mother risks a child's life; he's tactless and prone to mansplaining, but we are encouraged to view him sympathetically in part because the film consistently calls him on it and he actually learns. He's the obvious romantic hero. He can't quite understand why Leonora is shy of him, especially when the mutual attraction is as plain as the smile on her face. Inevitably he proposes to her, but she's still married to Ohlrig and there's an additional catch . . .
This is almost exactly the two-thirds mark of the film, by which point it had taken several turns neither of us was expecting. I wasn't even expecting the main characters, honestly. Turn the trope kaleidoscope a little and Smith Ohlrig could be the alpha hero of a billionaire romance, wealthy, workaholic, control-freakish and ultimately vulnerable—but he exists in the real world, and so he's an abusive asshole. He gives a touching speech about the hardship of his upbringing in which we learn that his father only left him four million, he had to bootstrap the rest: "I didn't drink it away, I didn't gamble it away, I didn't marry it away . . . That's what everyone wants, isn't it? Well, I've got it. And I made it myself." When he can't get what he wants by social leverage or main force of money, he suffers apparent life-threatening nervous attacks that he attributes to "a bad heart." The aptness of his words bypasses him completely. He needs either to own people or destroy them. As Skygiants pointed out, the film is a primer on the ways in which a relationship can be abusive without physical violence. Ohlrig never lays a hand on Leonora. He doesn't need to, when he controls her finances and her social access. He calls his wife his highest-paid employee, treats her as if she's a prostitute not worth her price; he humiliates her in public and private and holds the simultaneous lure and threat of a divorce over her head, freedom if she complies with him, ruin if she doesn't. And over and over again, he browbeats her with the reminder that she only married him for his money—an accusation that Leonora protests whether she hears it sneeringly from Ohlrig or uncomprehendingly from Quinada. We never see her think of herself as a gold digger. She's reluctant to accept even a party invitation from Ohlrig's slithery factotum Franzi (Curt Bois) because it makes her feel "cheap"; she put herself through charm school on her roommate's advice, in order to equip herself with the proper graces to land a rich husband, but her daydreams remain romantic: Prince Charming discovering her at the perfume counter.2 Each stage of her attempts at self-improvement, from the aggressively socialized, self-effacing femininity of charm school to her new job as a department store model that requires her to display herself and a $4995 mink coat equally, reinforces the idea that she's a piece of interchangeable merchandise. What she wants is to be loved for herself, not the glaze of nicely mannered passivity she's been taught to put on like a beauty mark over the small mole on her cheek. But the entire weight of societal expectation is against her and the compromise she makes, in order to marry an industrial tycoon without feeling like she's sold herself, is to convince herself she's in love.
I am fascinated by the film's willingness to star a heroine this ambivalent and, for lack of a better word, implicated in the system she's trying to resist. She's more sympathetic if she's a "good" girl, isn't she? She's more realistic if she's not. And the film rewards her throughout with a sympathetic sensitivity that didn't shock me after The Reckless Moment, but still found ways to surprise me. Her marriage has wounded her in ways I don't think I've often seen depicted onscreen. There's a beautifully observed moment early in her relationship with Quinada in which he drapes the surprise overcoat he's bought for her—after she told him not to; he thought she just didn't want to be a bother—around her shoulders and she freezes utterly. It is not pleasant for her to have men buy her things. It does not make her feel like a valued colleague or even an affectionate friend; it reminds her that she's trapped in a toxic economy where she is expected to reciprocate a material down payment with her body. She knows what Quinada means by the gesture; it's a trigger all the same. That's like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) levels of unspoken attention to the small details of surviving abuse.3 And once again I can't talk about the aspect of the film that really interested me without spoilers, so proceed at your own risk as usual.
( He can't hold her now. She's free. )
I know I am shortchanging Quinada, when Mason does a very good job with his first American role and one of his rare positive leading men. It is crucial to the film that neither Ophüls nor his scriptwriter Arthur Laurents positions him as an unmitigated hero; he is Leonora's ally and would-be lover, but he's not her savior, and he has perhaps even more trouble disentangling himself from absently sexist, heteronormative habits of thought than she does. She is not rescued from one man by another. With his background playing charismatic antiheroes for Gainsborough, Mason has the ability to acknowledge the problems with Quinada while making him believably appealing. He's complicit, too, but he's trying. I'm not at all surprised that Ophüls gave him an even better part in The Reckless Moment, morally shadier and even more attractive. That's a film I recommend for Mason; this one I recommend for Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Ryan, and Ophüls' awkwardly paced but astonishing confrontation with all the things wrong with being a woman in America, in 1949 and nowadays. Since I have said nothing at all about the cinematography, which is magnificent and pointed, as effective and conspicuous as a good prose style, I leave you with Mason's last word on the subject, written after two films with the director:
I think I know the reason why
Producers tend to make him cry.
Inevitably they demand
Some stationary set-ups, and
A shot that does not call for tracks
Is agony for poor dear Max,
Who, separated from his dolly,
Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.
Once, when they took away his crane,
I thought he'd never smile again.
This study courtesy of my steadfast backers at Patreon.
1. Ohlrig's psychiatrist is a magnificent human being played by Art Smith who is obviously not being paid enough to listen to this self-justifying Randian bullshit. Whenever he offers an insight about Ohlrig's behavior, his client dismisses him as a Freud-babbling quack. The movie spends the rest of its runtime proving that everything he said about Ohlrig was right.
2. Her roommate Maxine (Ruth Brady) is cheerfully upfront about her intent to marry for money if she gets the chance, love being an incidental but not necessary bonus. We thought she'd have done fine marrying Ohlrig and then living as a glamorous estranged wife in Paris with a stipend and a string of admirers.
3. Skygiants made some cogent points about the character of Franzi which I hope she will repeat in a post of her own, but he illustrates the complexity of the system: he is both an enabler of Ohlrig's abuse of Leonora and a victim himself. When she slaps him in a moment of uncharacteristically violent frustration and apologizes at once, he responds evenly, if a little breathlessly, "It's all right. It saves him from getting hit. That's what I get paid for." It doesn't make him a nice person, but it makes the film subtler and more like the world it's representing, where the patriarchy lets very few people off lightly.
skygiants to watch Max Ophüls' Caught (1949), the first of his two American films noirs. It's not as complex or as coherent a picture as its follow-up The Reckless Moment (1949), which stunned me in May, but it's a striking, strange, surprisingly blunt examination of the ways in which a woman can be trapped and bound by social conventions, constructions of gender, her own body and the laws which govern it. Much of it is still all too relevant and recognizable today, and I don't say that just because the film opens with two roommates morosely totaling their limited finances and complaining about the humidity.At first the story looks like a simple cautionary tale: the terrifying ease with which a Cinderella romance can turn into a Bluebeard marriage. Despite his brusque manner and his contemptuous affections, ex-carhop and recent charm school graduate Leonora Eames (Barbara Bel Geddes) allows herself to accept a proposal of marriage from high-powered businessman Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), because he's worth ninety million and how do you say no to that? No sooner are the wedding headlines yesterday's news than the reality of Leonora's situation sets in: her husband is a chilly, controlling, volatile man who gets his philosophy straight from Ayn Rand; he views every interaction as a transaction and despises his wife for marrying him, because her acquiescence only proves that he met her asking price. He only married her to spite his psychiatrist.1 Very sensibly, she flees Ohlrig's cavernous rococo mansion and takes a job as a receptionist in an East Side clinic where she forms a friendship with unfazeable obstetrician Dr. Hoffman (Frank Ferguson) and something closer with his partner Dr. Larry Quinada (James Mason), an idealistic dropout from the upper middle class still figuring out what a bedside manner looks like. "I'm a very good textbook doctor," he admits after his underestimation of an anxious mother risks a child's life; he's tactless and prone to mansplaining, but we are encouraged to view him sympathetically in part because the film consistently calls him on it and he actually learns. He's the obvious romantic hero. He can't quite understand why Leonora is shy of him, especially when the mutual attraction is as plain as the smile on her face. Inevitably he proposes to her, but she's still married to Ohlrig and there's an additional catch . . .
This is almost exactly the two-thirds mark of the film, by which point it had taken several turns neither of us was expecting. I wasn't even expecting the main characters, honestly. Turn the trope kaleidoscope a little and Smith Ohlrig could be the alpha hero of a billionaire romance, wealthy, workaholic, control-freakish and ultimately vulnerable—but he exists in the real world, and so he's an abusive asshole. He gives a touching speech about the hardship of his upbringing in which we learn that his father only left him four million, he had to bootstrap the rest: "I didn't drink it away, I didn't gamble it away, I didn't marry it away . . . That's what everyone wants, isn't it? Well, I've got it. And I made it myself." When he can't get what he wants by social leverage or main force of money, he suffers apparent life-threatening nervous attacks that he attributes to "a bad heart." The aptness of his words bypasses him completely. He needs either to own people or destroy them. As Skygiants pointed out, the film is a primer on the ways in which a relationship can be abusive without physical violence. Ohlrig never lays a hand on Leonora. He doesn't need to, when he controls her finances and her social access. He calls his wife his highest-paid employee, treats her as if she's a prostitute not worth her price; he humiliates her in public and private and holds the simultaneous lure and threat of a divorce over her head, freedom if she complies with him, ruin if she doesn't. And over and over again, he browbeats her with the reminder that she only married him for his money—an accusation that Leonora protests whether she hears it sneeringly from Ohlrig or uncomprehendingly from Quinada. We never see her think of herself as a gold digger. She's reluctant to accept even a party invitation from Ohlrig's slithery factotum Franzi (Curt Bois) because it makes her feel "cheap"; she put herself through charm school on her roommate's advice, in order to equip herself with the proper graces to land a rich husband, but her daydreams remain romantic: Prince Charming discovering her at the perfume counter.2 Each stage of her attempts at self-improvement, from the aggressively socialized, self-effacing femininity of charm school to her new job as a department store model that requires her to display herself and a $4995 mink coat equally, reinforces the idea that she's a piece of interchangeable merchandise. What she wants is to be loved for herself, not the glaze of nicely mannered passivity she's been taught to put on like a beauty mark over the small mole on her cheek. But the entire weight of societal expectation is against her and the compromise she makes, in order to marry an industrial tycoon without feeling like she's sold herself, is to convince herself she's in love.
I am fascinated by the film's willingness to star a heroine this ambivalent and, for lack of a better word, implicated in the system she's trying to resist. She's more sympathetic if she's a "good" girl, isn't she? She's more realistic if she's not. And the film rewards her throughout with a sympathetic sensitivity that didn't shock me after The Reckless Moment, but still found ways to surprise me. Her marriage has wounded her in ways I don't think I've often seen depicted onscreen. There's a beautifully observed moment early in her relationship with Quinada in which he drapes the surprise overcoat he's bought for her—after she told him not to; he thought she just didn't want to be a bother—around her shoulders and she freezes utterly. It is not pleasant for her to have men buy her things. It does not make her feel like a valued colleague or even an affectionate friend; it reminds her that she's trapped in a toxic economy where she is expected to reciprocate a material down payment with her body. She knows what Quinada means by the gesture; it's a trigger all the same. That's like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) levels of unspoken attention to the small details of surviving abuse.3 And once again I can't talk about the aspect of the film that really interested me without spoilers, so proceed at your own risk as usual.
( He can't hold her now. She's free. )
I know I am shortchanging Quinada, when Mason does a very good job with his first American role and one of his rare positive leading men. It is crucial to the film that neither Ophüls nor his scriptwriter Arthur Laurents positions him as an unmitigated hero; he is Leonora's ally and would-be lover, but he's not her savior, and he has perhaps even more trouble disentangling himself from absently sexist, heteronormative habits of thought than she does. She is not rescued from one man by another. With his background playing charismatic antiheroes for Gainsborough, Mason has the ability to acknowledge the problems with Quinada while making him believably appealing. He's complicit, too, but he's trying. I'm not at all surprised that Ophüls gave him an even better part in The Reckless Moment, morally shadier and even more attractive. That's a film I recommend for Mason; this one I recommend for Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Ryan, and Ophüls' awkwardly paced but astonishing confrontation with all the things wrong with being a woman in America, in 1949 and nowadays. Since I have said nothing at all about the cinematography, which is magnificent and pointed, as effective and conspicuous as a good prose style, I leave you with Mason's last word on the subject, written after two films with the director:
I think I know the reason why
Producers tend to make him cry.
Inevitably they demand
Some stationary set-ups, and
A shot that does not call for tracks
Is agony for poor dear Max,
Who, separated from his dolly,
Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.
Once, when they took away his crane,
I thought he'd never smile again.
This study courtesy of my steadfast backers at Patreon.
1. Ohlrig's psychiatrist is a magnificent human being played by Art Smith who is obviously not being paid enough to listen to this self-justifying Randian bullshit. Whenever he offers an insight about Ohlrig's behavior, his client dismisses him as a Freud-babbling quack. The movie spends the rest of its runtime proving that everything he said about Ohlrig was right.
2. Her roommate Maxine (Ruth Brady) is cheerfully upfront about her intent to marry for money if she gets the chance, love being an incidental but not necessary bonus. We thought she'd have done fine marrying Ohlrig and then living as a glamorous estranged wife in Paris with a stipend and a string of admirers.
3. Skygiants made some cogent points about the character of Franzi which I hope she will repeat in a post of her own, but he illustrates the complexity of the system: he is both an enabler of Ohlrig's abuse of Leonora and a victim himself. When she slaps him in a moment of uncharacteristically violent frustration and apologizes at once, he responds evenly, if a little breathlessly, "It's all right. It saves him from getting hit. That's what I get paid for." It doesn't make him a nice person, but it makes the film subtler and more like the world it's representing, where the patriarchy lets very few people off lightly.
